The Role of AI in the Paradigm Shift towards Enaction

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The Role of AI in the Paradigm Shift towards
Enaction

• Life and Mind seminar 2
• Tom Froese

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Overview

• Cognitivism
• Embodied-Embedded Cognitive Science
• Enactivism
• Beyond?

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The major transitions of cognitive science
Varela (1999)
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Cognitivism

• Cognition is taken to be essentially a form of
  centralized problem solving in the form of
  logical inference through abstract symbol
  manipulation.
• Mind and world are conceived of as fundamentally
  distinct. Hence, the need for representations.
• The body is conceptualized as an input/output
  device, the environment as a domain for problem
  solving.
• Connectionism cognition as less centralized.

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Symbolic AI

• The commonsense knowledge problem
• The move beyond toy worlds leads to a
  combinatorial explosion of representations and
  rules needed for cognitive behavior.
• The frame problem
• How does an abstract symbol processor determine
  what is relevant to its current situation?
  Infinite regress of symbol structures.
• The cognitivist mainstream (and its Cartesian
  assumptions) have been put to the test.

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Nouvelle AI

• Following Brooks, the field looked for new
  directions
• Situatedness a robot does not deal with abstract
  descriptions but with the world directly.
• Embodiment a robot has a body in such a way that
  its actions form a dynamic with the world and
  have immediate feedback on its sensations.
• Emergence the behavior of a robot emerges from
  its interactions with the world. It cannot be
  reduced to a particular part of the systemic
  whole.

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Embodied-Embedded Cognitive Science

1. Cognition is essentially fluid, flexible,
   real-time, context-sensitive, skillful, and
   adaptive coping.
2. Cognition is a dynamical process which spans an
   extended brain-body-system.
3. Cognition is a process which is embodied in an
   organism and embedded within a world.
4. A cognitive agent is best understood and analyzed
   as a dynamical system.

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A first paradigm shift
The Cartesian tradition
Cognitivism
Failure of symbolic AI / emergence of nouvelle AI
Embodied-Embedded Cognitive Science
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The role of AI and robotics

• It has provided the foundation for a lot of the
  conceptual developments.
• In its role as a subversive science it was able
  to question and undermine the constitutive
  assumptions underlying cognitivism.
• Philosophical stalemates could be resolved in the
  empirical domain of the cognitive sciences.

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Towards a new dialectic
rational
empirical
rational
empirical
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The Enactive Approach

• More recently the paradigm shift has been moving
  towards an enactive perspective
• Organisms are autonomous agents that actively
  generate and maintain their identities, and
  thereby enact or bring forth their own cognitive
  domains.
• The nervous system is autonomous it actively
  generates and maintains its own coherent and
  meaningful patterns of activity according to its
  operation as an operationally closed system.

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Organization of the living body Autopoiesis
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Operational closure
Rudrauf, et al. (2003)
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The Enactive Approach

• Cognition, conceived fundamentally as
  meaning-generation, arises from the sensorimotor
  coupling between organism and environment.
  Cognition is a form of embodied action.
• The organisms world is not a pre-specified,
  external realm somehow represented internally,
  but a relational domain enacted or brought forth
  by its autonomous agency and mode of coupling
  with the environment.
• The organisms experiential awareness is a
  central feature of its lived embodiment in the
  world.

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The problem of subjectivity

• A central concern of enactivism is an improved
  understanding of subjectivity. It does this from
  2 complementary perspectives
• Biological agency an autonomous system that
  produces and maintains its own identity.
• Phenomenal agency non-intentional and
  pre-reflective, lived bodily self-awareness.
• The explanatory gap is no longer absolute as
  both aspects of subjectivity make common
  reference to living being
• The living body as object
• The living body as subject

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Towards a new dialectic?
rational
empirical
experiential
rational
empirical
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The role of AI and robotics

• Can we still say that this shift towards
  enactivism is driven by developments in AI and
  robotics?
• How can its experimental results inform the
  experiential (phenomenological) component?
• How can insights gained from the principled use
  of 1st person methodologies inform AI research?
• Momentarily at least it appears that AI and
  robotics is trailing behind the shift towards
  enactivism.

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A second paradigm shift?
The Cartesian tradition
Cognitivism
Failure of symbolic AI / emergence of nouvelle AI.
?
Embodied-Embedded Cognitive Science
Enactivism
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The nature of the second shift

• Just like the cognitivism, the enactivist
  paradigm necessarily has its own set of metaphors
  (e.g. dynamics) and constitutive assumptions
  (e.g. embodiment).
• Both paradigms are based on distinct premises
  which therefore entail non-overlapping rational
  domains. Because of this there is a fundamental
  stalemate in the philosophical domain.
• Since the stalemate cannot be resolved
  rationally, a paradigm shift cannot be induced by
  means of argument alone. In the end the stalemate
  has to be resolved in the empirical domain of the
  cognitive sciences.
• But even empirical data has to be interpreted
  from a point of view. What determines which one
  we adopt for ourselves?

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Two explanatory paths
Maturanas (1988) ontological diagram
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The role of experience
Being-in-the-world
experiential
rational
empirical
All 3 domains do not only presuppose a background
of non-thematic skillful coping, but also one of
pre-reflective lived experience our way of
living/being.
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The role of experience
Philosophical
Cognitivism
Empirical
Embodied-Embedded Cognitive Science
Experiential
Enactivism
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Concluding remarks

• It is clear that AI and robotics has contributed
  immensely to the shift towards embodied-embedded
  cognitive science.
• It has done so by shifting the disputes from the
  philosophical domain to the empirical domain.
• The next challenge for this field is to improve
  our understanding of agency. Is it possible to
  synthesize autonomous agents?
• Nevertheless, a shift towards an enactive
  cognitive science appears to require shifting the
  dispute from the philosophical and empirical
  domains to the experiential domain.
• Open question What are the consequences?